The GUI has been unstable since upgrading to Fedora 18 & now 19: gdm, kdm, X and sometimes the whole machine crash. It was OK in F17.

Gnome was unstable in F18 - it lasted from an hour to a day or two before collapsing. I tried KDE and that had the same problems. Gnome won't start at all in F19: "Oh no! Something has gone wrong. A problem has occurred and the system can't recover. All extensions have been disabled as a precaution".

Don't know if this is relevant but I mainly use VNC to connect.

I only installed F18 (with fedup) a few weeks ago & went to F19 as soon as it was released in the hope it would fix things. Would it be worth reinstalling from scratch? Don't really want to but I've been upgrading since about F6 & maybe it's time for a clear-out.

For what it's worth, I've found that many of the newer kernels seem to have trouble with the nouveau drivers. Not just Fedora--I've had the same thing happen with Arch and Lubuntu. In all cases, I gave up and installed the proprietary NVidia drivers.

I don't remember exactly when it started--it might have been around the first 3.9 kernels, or even earlier.

nickz

14th August 2013, 06:54 PM

Thanks smr54

I tried to install the Nvidia driver but it collapses in a quivering heap. I gave up with that about 3 Fedoras ago for the same reason.

I removed the Nvidia 6200 LE video card & enabled the built-in video hardware, which uses the radeon driver. That was stable but far too slow for everyday use.

So I thought I'd start afresh & installed Fedora from the Live DVD onto the existing LVM root partition. On reboot, it dumped me into a "dracut #" shell because it couldn't find the root LV. Looking through dmesg, it appears that it's unable to see any discs, I think because it hadn't loaded the "megaraid" driver for the Megaraid 300-8x RAID card. That's puzzling because Fedora tried to start so it must have found the boot partition which although not a LV, is on a Megaraid disc. I couldn't work out how to do anything useful from the dracut shell (not even mount a usb stick to copy the logs) so now I'm trying to reinstall F19 from the Network Install DVD in the hope that it will be different.

Any further help would be welcome.

nickz

25th August 2013, 09:08 PM

An update: the Network Install gave a working Fedora 19 system with nouveau and after installing the tigervnc server, I could start putting it back together again. What's odd is that now I see the corruption of the screen on the physical console but not via VNC. I suspect it may be a hardware problem but that will have to wait till I get another video card (one that works with the Nvidia driver).

I've attached /var/log/Xorg.0.log showing how it fails with the Nvidia driver.